PHOTO: Leon PhillipsA detail of Expand 5 is on the front and back cover of Cultural Politics.

The work of Vancouver artist Leon Phillips is featured in the current issue of Cultural Politics, an international refereed journal published by Duke University Press.

A wraparound detail of an abstract painting by Phillips called Expand 5 is on the front and back cover. Inside, Phillips has written an article about his work called Lyotard’s Dance of Paint. Illustrating the text is a black and white image of Expand 5 plus three black and white images of other watercolours by Phillips. Full colour images are available on the Cultural Politics website and by going to the artist’s website.

The issue is a special one focusing on the work of Jean-Francois Lyotard, a French philosopher most often associated with postmodernism. Called Rewriting Lyotard, the issue expands on what Lyotard is usually known for by focusing on the importance of aesthetics and visual art to his work.

The inclusion of images and text by Phillps in a major cultural journal is a significant accomplishment for an artist working in Vancouver.

First of all, it’s recognition of a local artist whose primary medium is painting. That’s unusual for an artist in a city whose international reputation as an art centre has been built on largely on photography and video. As a medium, painting generally doesn’t get much respect.

I’ve never understood that kind of prejudice against one medium. If arguments about painting’s relevance once held any validity, they don’t anymore. They now sound dated. Today, if there’s one quality that characterizes being contemporary it’s the egalitarianism of mediums. It doesn’t matter what you use – just make good work.

It’s also a sign, if one was needed, that painting never really died. It may have been outside whatever was considered the art mainstream but it was never fully abandoned. A philosopher such as Lyotard took both gesture and colour seriously and thought painting was particularly good at exploring both. He didn’t ignore them because of their slipperiness and reluctance to fit easily into words and concepts.

In Phillips’ work gesture isn’t emotive or lyrical. His paintings don’t look manufactured like modernist geometric works but they do look like they’ve painted themselves. That quality may have to do with the paint being allowed to express itself. As it flowed and traveled over the surface of the paper, the paint created fractal-like patterns. If you look closely at Expand, for example, you can see soft white amoeba-like forms. They look as if lighter colour has grown on top of the darker ones underneath.

If modernist gesture was about paint expressing the artist’s subconscious or an inner psychological state, then Phillips’ contemporary gesture builds on that and goes a step further: it combines the artist’s intention in the initial application of paint with chance in the way the paint chooses its final shape. It’s paint applied by a paw that’s aware of its past.

Phillips’ works don’t ignore photography. Just as some artists working in photography have used the conventions of painting in their work, Phillips has gone the other way to incorporate some of the conventions of photography in his. A turning point for him was going to Berlin and seeing the way German painter Gerhard Richter explicitly and implicitly used and incorporated ideas about photography. One convention of photography that’s evident in Phillips’ watercolours is the contrast between blurriness and sharpness which recall looking through a camera and bringing an image into focus. In film and photography, the simultaneous blurry/sharp contrast in an image often suggests the deep emotional state of a character or is used to call attention to something.

The colours and shapes in Expand 5 are barely being contained by the four edges of the painting. In contrast, the Nest paintings have a little more time to transform into whatever it is they’re supposed to become. They have a core of sharp/blurry coloured forms with a wild, energetic edge. Those coloured barbs look like they could sting. They need the freedom of the white space to move and express themselves.

Phillips’ works are entirely flat but full of depth. Yet they don’t use any of the traditional techniques of figurative painting to create illusionistic space. They create depth with a minimum of means: by laying colours on top of each other. Not only does this result in surprising combinations when the colours intersect, the layering reveals the process of the paint’s application. The paint doesn’t have to be anything other than itself.

On the main board of Cultural Politics is French cultural theorist Paul Virilio. Its advisory board includes philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Zizek and literary theorist and philosopher Gayatri Chakravoty Spivak.

The special issue on Lyotard is edited by Peter W. Milne, assistant professor of aesthetics at Seoul National University. Milne grew up in West Vancouver and attended the University of B.C. for his undergraduate degree. The arts editor is Brooklyn artist Joy Garnett.

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Before writing and posting this blog, I’ve asked for and received clearance from my editor. I’ve done that because of my personal involvement with the artist: Leon Phillips is my partner.

I’m writing about him because his work has been recognized by a major U.S. cultural journal. That it itself is newsworthy and would have been something for me to write about had any other Vancouver-based artist been similarly recognized. It would have been the perfect kind of item for a blog about art in Vancouver. Not writing about his work in Cultural Politics would have meant penalizing him because of our relationship. That, to me, would have been unfair.

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